some past and some present

During my run today I had an interesting stream of thoughts that I want to try to capture but I some how doubt I can do it justice. This is going to be a long one so you might want to just pass on by this particular post.

I often get asked what my tattoo is on my ankle and I never really explain why I have a large phoenix as my tattoo.  My name actually means "reborn" and the phoenix is a fire spirit that burns, reduced to ashes and reborn - and honestly that is how I feel about my entire life. Over the last 40+ years I have been forced to rise up from complete destruction, start a new and survive it better than I was before.  For the most part, I have done that.

This week an old high school friend reached out to me to tell me about saying good-bye to this girl she and her family had taken in because her family disowned her.  The girl joined the marines but had lived with my friend and her family for many months finishing high school and figuring out what to do next.  When it initially happened, my friend reached out to me asking how she could help this girl because one of my many opportunities to survive the fire was being disowned by my family at 17.   She wanted to know what the girl needed, should she try to reconcile the family, really what would help the most.  I tried to explain the best I could that really the thing that hurts the most is thinking that there is no one in the world that cares about you and if she could give the gift of filling that gap, things would be better and the reconciliation had to come from the family not from her.

It struck me odd this circular nature, especially coming from this specific friend.  Her and I had been inseparable throughout junior high school.  I literally hid at her house as much as I could to stay away from my own troubles.  She decided to go to another high school and did not really tell me until school almost started and it crushed me or at least that is how I remember it.  I felt completely and utterly betrayed and alone.  I blamed her for many years for not caring and just deserting me - not really remembering she was a 16 year old girl too.  We did not really talk much after that (strangely I attended her wedding but that is all I can ever remember) and was shocked when she found me on facebook and was so glad to connect to her old best friend.

I was surprised she thought of me that way.  I was surprised that she still remembered me, wanted to connect and held such contempt for my family and the way they treated me.  She reminded me of things that had happened that I had all but forgotten about.  It was healing for me in a strange way.  I was able to reframe the fact that this 16 year old girl did not desert me but had to live her life and I was in pretty bad shape at the time.

More than that, my troubles inspired her when she met this girl who had no one to lend a hand and provide her the help she needed to survive.  I do not know if the marines was a really good choice for a girl during war time, but this girl got a chance to feel cared for and loved in a time when life probably felt pretty dark.  At least in my experiences that was some really pretty bad days...living in the car, wondering what to do, so young, so alone.

One of the things I have been thinking about is how I actively try not to feel.  I have had many difficult times in my life and one of the coping mechanisms that I learned was to mute my wants, desires and base emotions.  That may not make sense but it worked for me over the years.  I have spent most of my career in a male driven, aggressive environment where this ability was absolutely critical to my success.  I noticed recently that I have shut down completely to manage through the intense stress at my work.  I attempt to absolutely cleanse myself on any emotion and try to stay as base as possible leaving a shell of a person.

The thing I noticed is that 1) it doesn't really work.  It is more shoving emotion down deep where it seems have more impact on my own self.  I do not know how to really explain that so I will not really try 2) it impacts my ability to feel anything.  I guess that should seem obvious but it has not been to me.  All the emotion I can muster to show folks at that time is not fake but not real either.  It is what I think I should be feeling if I was feeling anything.  Thoughts like - I should ask how their weekend was and I should check on this have to cross my mind.  I pay attention to when I am not really feeling and make sure I still act normal.  I guess I do not know how to explain that either.

I have kind of realized this before but in subtle ways.  I will watch a sappy movie to force myself to cry.  I will drink heavily so I "unlock myself" or I do something extreme to just wake up a little. Maybe all this psycho mumbo jumbo is really just useless and has nothing to do with anything but I wondered if I could actually break my ability to feel at some point.  Could I become so unaccustomed to feeling that I can not shake myself back into reality?  I doubt that but it was the thoughts in my head over the last few days and thinking about that girl joining the marines (I joined the air force for the exact same reason) just reverberated through my head during my run.